On 2023-02-10, Diederik de Haas wrote: Nice summary!
> On Friday, 10 February 2023 16:57:07 CET Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: >> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 09:06:10AM +0100, Christian Marillat wrote: >> > Is Orange Pi 4 LTS (arm64) supported in Debian. ... >> OrangePi themselves have a version of Debian Bullseye server and Debian >> Bullseye xfce desktop available. > > If you have a working bootloader which (successfully) starts 'some' kernel > and > combine that with a userland created by f.e. debootstrap and you have a > working Debian-like system. > > The problem with most BSPs is this: The device/chipset vendor proved with it > that the device/SBC works and can run Linux. And then they throw it over the > wall and 'say' "have fun with it" (our job is done). > > I'm going to assume that "supported *in* Debian" (emphasis mine) means > whether > it's supported by all-and-only Debian packages. > > For that you need 2 things: > 1) device/SBC is supported by *upstream* u-boot If it lacks u-boot but has a workable UEFI implementation, you do not generally need u-boot. > 2) device/SBC is supported by the *upstream* kernel > > And that is where most SBCs are lacking, unless the SBC manufacturor or (more > commonly) the community around it, works to upstream all the needed bits. > So it all comes down to upstreaming all the needed parts. > > Wrt kernel support: if there is a .dts file for your board in Linus' tree, > that's usually a *very* encouraging sign. That doesn't automatically mean > everything is fully supported, but at least some attempt to get it merged > upstream has been successful. > *If* that's the case, then you need to figure out which kernel modules are > needed for your device and whether they are enabled in Debian's kernel. > Debian's kernel config is distinct from what is enabled in some (upstream's) > *defconfig* file. > So you'd need to build a kernel to verify that it works with those > (additional) kernel modules and if that's the case you can either file a bug > against the kernel requesting those module to get enabled and/or you can > submit a MR to the kernel-team's salsa repo. ... and ideally also track down which kernel .udeb packages to add those modules to as well, so that it can be supported in debian-installer... and if all goes well, adding bootable images for debian-installer. live well, vagrant
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